Moving forum root location to a different folder (URL Redirects)

[Goad]

Loyal SMF Fan here....My forum will be 15 years old in October. Been running it on SMF the whole time.

Right now its hosted at the root of my domain (Domain.com) and I would like to move it to Domain.com/Forum. I know this is totally easy to do in the forum settings, but the problem is I have 15 years of backlinks, hostage images, etc that I don't want to break. Is there an easy way to avoid this or is it just a decision to weigh out to keep it where it is vs move it and deal with the broken backlinks?

My end goal here is to have more of a website front end (ex Wordpress) then have a link to the forum, rather than the forum being the first thing they see. I am using EZ Portal, but it just isn't the vibe i want for my home page anymore.

I am all open to ideas/suggestions.

[Ninja ZX-10RR]

Tough one, had it been the other way around much easier but non-forum to forum url is... Very tricky with backlinks.
3rd party hosted images (if that's what you meant) won't be affected because they are an external site so that's out of the window at least.
Links... What links have you been using? Stuff like (random link here) https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?board=147.0 ? Or any topic link? I do have an idea even though it's a bit of a weird one as I've never done that, but it may be possible to redirect all "site.com/index.php?" to "site.com/forum/index.php?" via .htaccess. I haven't had sleep in like 18h so it's probably not the correct time for me to write htaccess code, so I'll just wait for some details and whether I understood your situation correctly

Also crucial questions:
1) Do you use "Pretty URLs" mod?
2) Do you have "Search Engine friendly URLs" checkbox activated in action=admin;area=featuresettings;?

[Kindred]

if you are just talking about links in messages (on your site)   then it's simple.

You can do a REPLACE in the smf_messages table, body column....

UPDATE smf_messages SET body=REPLACE(body,old_url,new_url);

for example

Code Select Expand


UPDATE smf_messages SET body=REPLACE(body,'yoursite.com','yoursite.com/forum');




If you are talking about backlinks from OTHER sites being redirected....    well, if you don't plan to put anything in your root folder, then it's just a simple htaccess forward. However, if you have to parse the URL and determine if it's supposed to go to the forum or stay in the root (because you have some new pages in the root) then things get complicated.

If you plan to put some other script in the root (like wordpress) then things get REALLY complicated

[Goad]

Sorry for the super late reply...

I am using Pretty URL's

I am talking about links in the forum as well as from other sites.

...and yes, I am planning on using WordPress for my new root.

The objective is to avoid any interruption from links internally, like someone posted a link to a thread in another thread 5 years ago - I want that link to continue to work. Also, if someone posted a link on some other forum to a thread that is on my forum.

All while moving the forum from /index.php to /forum/index.php

-OR-

If there is a way to leave the forum in the root, but traffic thats intended for the forum is directed to the forum.

The ultimate goal here is when someone goes to mydomain.com, I want them to see wordpress initially. Not SMF. All of the SMF portals out there are just clunky and very limited with options.....and I'd like to clean up my homepage a bit.

[Kindred]

WordPress does not actually play nice with other scripts.

You have to move your forum..    and even then,  WordPress is going to intercept and break your links.

Fixing the links in YOUR database is easy.  Just do a replace SQL query to

Update smf_messages set body = replace (body, "old url", "new url");

This won't affect any links coming into your site from other places, though.
There is no good way to do that if you are putting WordPress in the root

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

If you do want to run both WP and SMF, I would suggest a separate subdomain for one of them.
SMF can work under Wordpress in a separate folder like /forum/ but that depends on your wordpress installs specifics so much that I wouldn't necessarily recommend that as the first option.

[Goad]

If you do want to run both WP and SMF, I would suggest a separate subdomain for one of them.
SMF can work under Wordpress in a separate folder like /forum/ but that depends on your wordpress installs specifics so much that I wouldn't necessarily recommend that as the first option.

Thats what I am trying to do, but trying to preserve 15 years of internal and external links.

I would like to move SMF from the root to /forum and I would like to install WP in the root.

Is there any .htaccess magic that can be done for url re-writes. Like if it detects its a link trying to access a SMF post, it will add /forum/ to the link?

[shadav]

If you do want to run both WP and SMF, I would suggest a separate subdomain for one of them.
SMF can work under Wordpress in a separate folder like /forum/ but that depends on your wordpress installs specifics so much that I wouldn't necessarily recommend that as the first option.

Thats what I am trying to do, but trying to preserve 15 years of internal and external links.

I would like to move SMF from the root to /forum and I would like to install WP in the root.

Is there any .htaccess magic that can be done for url re-writes. Like if it detects its a link trying to access a SMF post, it will add /forum/ to the link?

not in this case no....since your forum was in the root, any redirects would redirect everything to the forum so your wordpress would be unusable
now if you have some popular posts you could do a 301 rewrite for each of them

Code Select Expand

RewriteRule ^the_posts's_old_url$ the_post's_new_url [R=301,L]

but unfortunately there's no easy way to redirect the root folder to a subfolder without making the root folder now obsolete.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Also, WP does it's own magic and tries to capture all requests to it's folder - it's gonna be tricky, if not impossible.

[Goad]

ok, so I am abandoning this idea of moving the forum's root.

Is it possible to run a 100% custom home page?

I am wanting to make something completely modern. All of the "portal" mods are super dated and blah.

If you guys have any suggestions, let me know.

[Mick.]

Portal. Really you can take advantage of the portal with articles, ads, links with some css edits. My own forum (signature) I converted it to act and look like a blog. CSS man. Some portals have the ability to not use titles on blocks to which is a great deal for me. Find landing pages scripts and use that code. Codepen.io have plenty of ideas.